On the Plains 1863

Curator: Let's delve into Albert Bierstadt's "On the Plains," an oil-on-canvas landscape painted around 1863. Editor: Immediately striking is its pervasive, almost monochromatic earthiness. The palette evokes vastness, but there is a sense of dust and aridity that dominates. Curator: Bierstadt was a prominent figure of the Hudson River School, an artistic movement deeply intertwined with notions of manifest destiny and the romanticization of the American West. We can understand the artwork, and indeed Bierstadt’s other paintings, in light of postcolonial theory and his use of art to perpetuate harmful cultural mythologies, for example his paintings consistently lacked native American inhabitants of these environments or displayed them as subservient and small on a grand landscape. Editor: Indeed, considering manifest destiny, I notice how this work’s composition highlights the land’s materiality. It appears raw, almost untamed. What about the actual pigments he might have used here; do we know much about his technical process in crafting these scenes? Was he focused on capturing the direct quality of light itself? Curator: Historians suggest Bierstadt was meticulously calculating, often drawing from multiple sketches made in the field to construct these grand idealized paintings back in his studio, catering to eastern audiences' perceptions. Editor: Ah, so it's a staged reality. I imagine the transportation of these canvases must have been quite the logistical endeavor as well. One wonders about the support systems, labor, and class dynamics inherent in that act of artistic creation. Curator: Precisely, and it’s essential to read these landscapes not simply as neutral depictions of nature, but as potent visual narratives steeped in a political agenda. Editor: Thanks to a materialist lens, I'm pushed to question how Bierstadt's choices in material representation contribute to the ideologies of his time. It gives an even greater significance to the muted palette; is that dirtiness complicit? Curator: Seeing this work again reminds us that even ostensibly beautiful scenes can mask complex historical narratives of cultural dominance. Editor: I’ll take that lesson and the feel of this painting away with me and, moving forward, hopefully view every landscape with renewed scrutiny for the realities layered beneath the surface.